HARDIN: Let’s Make Halloween Scary Again

I don’t know about
your town, but trick-or-treat has gotten unbelievably lame around
here, so lame that teenagers wouldn’t be caught dead
trick-or-treating anymore. I don’t blame them a bit. First,
trick-or-treat now happens in broad daylight. No self-respecting
trick-or-treater ever goes out until after dark. These days, parents,
in street clothes, lead their toddlers around the neighborhood
dressed in licensed, store bought costumes, depicting trademarked TV
superheroes and cartoon characters, in the middle of the afternoon.

Even the kids look
perplexed. “Why do we do this?” They all seem to say. Why,
indeed? All that’s left of trick-or-treat is the stuff you spend
money on: corporate costumes, corporate candy, Chinese-made
animatronic e-waste, inflatable plastic crap and dollar store
decorations, none of them scary. They’ve outlawed or done away
with everything else. How did it come to this?

I blame the media.
Anytime someone gets hurt or killed trick-or-treating, the press made
a big deal of it. Kid gets hit by a car on August 31, not news, but a
kid in a costume gets hit by a car on October 31, big news. The media
unnecessarily sensationalized trick-or-treat mishaps, like kids
eating drugged candy, biting into apples with needles stuck in them or getting hit by cars on dark roads. Widespread reports of these
isolated incidents whipped the public into a frenzy that allowed
churches, “do-gooders” and cops to chop the balls off of
Halloween.

Trick-or-treat is
supposed to be dangerous — dangerous and scary — and it’s supposed
to happen at night, in the dark. No flashlights, no reflective
material, wearing mostly black, homemade costumes with identity-concealing masks, we’d go door to door begging for candy, with the
threat of real mischief. trick-or-treat meant “cough-up the sweet
stuff or we’ll TP your house, leave a flaming bag of dog-do on your
porch or shmush a moldy rotten pumpkin on the windshield of your
car.”

When these hideous,
pitiful creatures knock on your door, recoil in horror, give them a
treat, and thank your lucky stars that you don’t share their fate.
Or, scare them off by jumping out of the bushes in your own hideous
costume, when they approach the door. But if you refuse to answer
the door and offer no treats, you probably deserve whatever they do
to you, because you were too much of a coward to face them directly.

I think its high
time to reclaim “Beggars Night.” Begging, not prostitution, is
the oldest profession. Like prostitution, begging will outlast us
all. Begging is a part of life, it’s part of the fabric of our
culture that won’t go away. On “Beggars Night” everyone can be
a beggar, and everyone in your community will know how you treat the
beggars who come to your door.

In this way “Beggars
Night” teaches young people how to treat the unfortunate people who
will ask them for help throughout their lives, and why it’s important
not to turn your back on them. It seems that too many adults in this
area never learned that lesson. While begging is shameful, it’s not
nearly as shameful as it is to be uncharitable to strangers in need.
Besides that, “Beggars Night” used to be a hell of a lot of fun!